When the Israel education-focused iCenter announced it was shuttering  in February after 17 years, the board called it both “an ending and a handoff.” 

Today, the Chicago-based Spertus Institute took the baton. Beginning this fall, the school will be the new home for the iCenter’s Conflicts of Interest program, which trains educators in new methods to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the institute shared exclusively with eJP.

Launched in 2023, Conflicts of Interest was one of iCenter’s newest initiatives. The Spertus Institute will keep the program the same — including three days of in-person seminars — but the goal is to expand to serve more cohorts and provide additional programs for alumni. The institute also hopes that the curriculum can be a model for educators discussing polarized issues as a whole, Spertus said.

Founded in 1924 as Chicago’s College of Jewish Studies, the Spertus Institute offers graduate degrees, certificates and public programs. Conflicts of Interest is a certificate program, and the institute will have four cohorts with approximately 30 students in Year 1, eight cohorts in Year 2 and 12 in Year 3.

The institute defines educators broadly.

“Our target audience are anywhere where Jewish education is happening, and so that includes Hillels, and that includes youth movements, and that includes summer camps and day schools and supplementary schools, and I would even say engagement professionals at federations,” Keren Fraiman, Spertus Institute’s vice president and chief academic officer, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “Education around this topic is entering into so many Jewish spaces, and so our hope is that anywhere that there are educators who are thinking and addressing some of these questions, that they will consider joining us as students.”

Fraiman, who is spearheading the program, received the Jewish Funders Network’s 2025 Ilia Salita Excellence in Research Award for her work on the barriers that educators face in holding discussions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the Oct. 7 terror attacks, even though many educators would love to avoid these often difficult discussions, she said, such conversations are unavoidable.

Jewish American children today know about the conflict as early as kindergarten, Fraiman said. “It’s on their social. It’s at their Hillels. It’s at encampments. It’s in their classrooms. It is ever present for young Jews — not just young Jews — and so the urgency to actually address these issues is more than it ever was before.”

Earlier generations of educators often avoided teaching complicated truths about Israel, including the country’s flaws and mistakes, and it backfired, Fraiman said.

Not facing the “more challenging realities and choices that Israel had to make over the years” led to many Jews feeling lied to, she said. “Sometimes people will say to me, ‘I’m worried that people get to college and worry about lies that they encounter,’ and I often say that I worry about the truths that they’ll encounter… The mistakes that perhaps we [educators] made was that we didn’t trust our learners enough to contend with complexity, and in every other aspect of their life they know how to hold multiple truths, they know how to hold complexity, they know how to love and critique at the same time.”

The institute is currently recruiting faculty for the program, seeking staff who “have both academic rigor and experience in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in Israel more broadly, but that also have educational sensibilities,” Fraiman said.

The program will cost $150, which includes hotel and the seminar, but not airfare. It is receiving multiyear support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Jim Joseph Foundation and Crown Family Philanthropies. 

In addition to the core programming, the institute will offer alumni webinars to ensure past cohorts are prepared to cultivate nuanced discussions about the ever-changing conflict. The institute also hopes that it will not just be educators that the program impacts, but supervisors who should also take a perspective of openness around polarized discussions. 

The program will not decide who participates based on anyone’s definition or stance on Zionism, Dean Bell, Spertus Institute’s president and CEO, told eJP. “More important for us is not how somebody is going to label themselves, but… if they’re open to having conversation around multiple narratives and complexity.”

While Conflicts of Interest focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “we recognize that it’s in conversation with this broader polarized moment,” Fraiman said.